


some I had to leave behind

by DivineProjectZero



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies)
Genre: Gen, Mildly Alternative Ending, Mostly Spider-man: Far From Home Compliant, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), so I tried to tag only more significant characters, the science in this fic is questionable at best, there are other characters but I can't be bothered to tag them all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 18:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20475422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DivineProjectZero/pseuds/DivineProjectZero
Summary: Everybody else is moving on; why is Tony reluctant to do the same?(aka the one where Tony is a ghost.)





	some I had to leave behind

**Author's Note:**

> Self-betaed. All mistakes are mine. Constructive feedback is always welcome.
> 
> One time I made a joke about how I wanted Tony to come back to life just to kick Mysterio's ass. That joke decided to come to life and kick MY ass. This is the fic where that kinda happens. 
> 
> Special thanks to Ven, who cheered for me through this entire process, and Avian, who gracefully listened to me whine about this fic for over a month.
> 
> Title from "7 Years" by Lukas Graham.

When Tony wakes up, it’s in the middle of his funeral.

“What the fuck,” he says. Nobody responds, so he looks down at his hands and discovers that they're not really quite there. At least, not physically.

He swears louder this time. “What the _fuck_.”

-

As a man of science, Tony despairs over the very questionable laws of physics that allows the existence of ghosts. As a hero who had a Norse god and a talking raccoon on his team, Tony can’t help but think this is probably one of the less questionable things that has happened in his (after)life. 

As a father, he can’t help but think it’s a goddamn miracle that he gets to see Morgan again, and he’s so thankful for the questionable science of the universe because it allows him to watch his beloved baby and Pepper resume their normal lives after the whole mess. Sure, it breaks his not-beating heart sometimes to see Morgan asking where her daddy is or Pepper quietly sobbing alone on their bed alone at night, but he still gets to see them live and smile and laugh. Because Pepper is the unbreakable light of Tony’s life, she pulls herself together and powers through her post-Tony days with admirable grace, and Morgan, because she’s half-Potts and perfect, follows suit. 

Tony loves them so much.

-

Of course, there are rough patches. A couple weeks into his ghostly existence, Tony catches Morgan tossing and turning in her bed, her face scrunched up in distress as she flails her way through a nightmare, and Tony can’t help but reach out, wishing he could soothe away the pain. He knows he’ll just pass through her and that the failed contact will make his entire being ache with frustration, but paternal instincts are an undying bitch. So he reaches out to touch his immaterial fingertips to his forehead with a wish on the tip of his tongue, and then—

—he’s standing in a tranquil landscape of glass and water and an endless golden sky, bewildered and all alone.

No, not alone.

“Daddy?”

Tony whirls around and Morgan is there, looking up at him with wide eyes and tilted head, her hand curling up to tug at the hem of his cardigan—he’s wearing the clothes he wore at home, he realizes—and Tony’s heart is so big it could explode.

“Maguna,” he coos, and lifts her up to swing her in a giggly circle, dancing on the surface of a boundless ocean. “Morgan, sweetheart, I missed you so much.”

-

In the morning, Morgan wakes up and Tony is back in the bedroom, unable to be touched or heard. But Morgan is smiling, even if she doesn't remember her dreams, and his heart is full. It’s good enough for him.

-

“I miss you,” Pepper says, curled up in Tony’s arms and warm against Tony’s chest as they sit under a golden sky that stretches on forever. “It’s harder than I thought, living without you.”

“I miss you too,” Tony says. It’s true. He misses her even though he’s been hovering around the periphery of her and Morgan’s lives for the past couple weeks, watching them across an uncrossable chasm separating the living and the dead. 

He doesn’t say that aloud, though. Even if Morgan and Pepper can’t remember their conversations with him in their dreams, the emotional remnants carry over subconsciously, and it’s not fair to have them thinking Tony is unable to move on in peace. 

Instead he says, “Take your time moving on from me, will you? Maybe give it another couple years.”

That makes Pepper laugh, just like he intended. “Oh, Tony.” Her smile is still just as beautiful as the first time he saw it. “I’ll never be completely over you.”

“Me neither. “ Tony kisses her forehead. It’s a habit he developed with Morgan and then Pepper, something that his mother used to do when he was younger. Something to remind his family that he loves them. “It’s always been you, Pep.”

-

Because Tony is a man of science, he experiments.

He’s figured out that he can enter and leave people’s dreams at his will. He’d do it every night if he could, but he's also figured out that entering dreams tires him out a bit in an existential kind of way rather than a physical one. So he resists the urge and limits himself to once in a while instead.

Now that he’s aware he can do more than float around, Tony tests his ghostly limits. He can drift roughly pretty fast, but not as fast as his suits. People passing through him doesn’t seem to elicit the classic goosebumps and _I think I passed through a cold spot_ reaction. He passes through every single solid material he encounters and can’t affect them in any way. Nobody seems to hear him, even when he yells really, really hard at them.

One day, he starts floating his way up north to go see the ruins of the old Avengers compound, because he wants to test whether he’s spiritually bound to staying within a certain distance to his family. Halfway through, he feels a certain kind of nostalgia for Rhodey and thinks, _god I wish I could hang out with him again._

As soon as he thinks that, there’s a flash of blue and then he’s floating beside Rhodey getting a standard medical checkup.

“Oh my god.” Tony watches a nurse draw blood from his best friend, and then swings an arm at Rhodey’s shoulders to test if he can hug him—which doesn’t work, of course—and settles for flapping his arms and yelling, “I can teleport!”

-

He tries teleporting back to Pepper, succeeds, then goes back to Rhodey. He tries going to his favorite Starbucks, which doesn’t work, so he tries his lab, which _does_ work. And there he finds Happy, stroking Dum-E’s metal arm and saying, “Yeah, we’re not donating you anywhere, don’t worry.”

Tony stays that night, watching his robots power down and enter sleep mode. He tries to see if he can enter any dreams there, but it doesn’t work that way. He knew that. 

He still wishes he could have talked to his bots one more time.

-

Tony tests his teleporting abilities a little more. It seems like he can teleport to places he has some kind of emotional attachment to (he can still teleport to the ex-Avengers Tower, he notes with a hint of irony), and the same goes for people. He can visit Rhodey and Happy wherever they are. He can visit Bruce, who has his arm in a sling and looks sad whenever he thinks nobody is looking. He goes to Clint, who has settled into a domestic, happy routine with his family, even if he looks a little haunted in the quiet moments. Tony watches him bend down to crush his youngest—Nathaniel, Tony remembers, named after Natasha, and isn’t that reminder a kick to his gut—into a hug, and it inexplicably gives Tony the urge to see Peter Parker.

He blinks and then he’s in Peter’s bathroom, which, yikes. But Peter isn’t taking a shower or brushing his teeth or using the toilet. Well, he’s sitting _on_ the toilet, lid closed, and sniffling with red, wet eyes. In his hands, he’s clutching his Spider-man mask. 

“Oh, kid,” Tony sighs. He doesn’t even have the courage to stay until Peter falls asleep, because this isn’t something a half-remembered dream could even begin to heal. He doesn’t even know what he’d say, anyway. Peter isn’t old enough to take things in stride and he isn’t young enough to let the hurt fade away fast enough. His heart is too big and now that it’s ripped open, the wound is too tender and raw, and Tony isn’t brave enough to even try to fix that. 

So he leaves, hoping time will let it scab over.

-

He goes around to see Nebula, discovers he’s apparently not emotionally attached to Scott Lang or Rocket enough to teleport to them, and then pops in on Steve in the early evening.

“Glad to know that I apparently still care about you,” Tony remarks to Steve’s unhearing ears. Sarcasm isn’t half as fun if nobody can hear him. “Guess we could’ve been friends if I’d stayed alive, huh.”

Bucky Barnes is also in the room, Tony realizes, and they’re having some kind of heartfelt discussion that Tony probably shouldn’t eavesdrop on, even if it’s probably his ghostly _raison d'etre_ to eavesdrop on everything. So he’s about to leave and maybe snoop around Steve’s living quarters when he hears something like, “I’m going back, Buck.”

“You sure about this?” Barnes asks, and there’s a hint of resignation to his serious tone that makes Tony think he should stay and hear this out.

-

“I’m sorry, you’re using my time travel tech to do _what_?” Tony yells that night. “You fucking _moron_!”

Steve raises his hands in a sign of appeasement. “Tony, I’m not sure if you should be dictating my life choices—”

“I get to when you’re using _my_ tech to make _terrible_ life choices!” Tony shoves a finger at Steve’s chest, just like he used to do in the old days when they were still a team that didn’t know what it was like to be divided. Back when they argued and jabbed and still had each other’s backs anyway. “Come on, Rogers. You know better than this.”

“You told me to get a life,” Steve says, very quietly. 

“_Here_.” Tony taps Steve’s chest one more time, gentler and kinder than he’s ever been to Steve in the past. “You can have one here, where you can watch Wilson become your best legacy, where you can still be this Bucky Barnes’s friend. Where you already have a life.”

“A life where you’re gone,” Steve says, and Tony takes it all back. He and Steve were friends, dammit, even when they were divided and didn’t have each other’s backs. “I miss you, you know.”

“Then _stay_," Tony hisses, because he can talk to people in dreams but not if they’re seventy years in the past. “Stay to visit my grave to heroically weep or whatever. Go talk shit about me with the rest of the gang and check up on them sometimes because they could use having you around. Be an uncle to my kid, you idiot.” He doesn’t want to miss Steve any more than this. Not when there are already so many people he misses even when they’re right there. “I need you _here_.”

Steve laughs, choked and wet and somewhat relieved. Like all he wanted was somebody to tell him that they needed him to stay. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

-

Steve is gone for five seconds, then he’s back.

“You’re still here,” Barnes says, an undercurrent of surprise laced through his words. 

“Yeah.” Steve sets down an empty briefcase and steps off the platform. “I thought I heard Tony yelling at me for being an idiot. So I came back.”

“Maybe it’s Stark’s ghost.” Barnes doesn’t realize how true his words are. “He knocked more sense into you than I ever could.”

It’s a shame, Tony thinks. He could have been friends with Bucky Barnes if he’d still been alive.

-

He may have stopped Steve through sheer willpower and luck, but he can’t stop Thor.

“Wait,” Tony says, even though nobody can hear him. He wills Thor to be able to make some use of his weird godly powers to recognize Tony’s voice. “Goddammit, Thor, I don’t even know how this teleporting business works if you’re in outer space.”

Thor is bidding his farewells to his people, the Milano parked behind him, and Tony is torn between pride and despair over Thor’s decision to go explore who he is out there in the stars. He knows Thor was never the kind of guy to stay bound to a single place or planet, but this time he’s not sure when Thor will be back. If he’ll be back. And there are only a dozen people Tony apparently cared about enough to appear at their sides instantly, and to have two of them so far away from earth is a terrifying prospect. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to go see them—or worse: if he can go to them but not be able to make it back.

So when Thor turns and takes a step into the Milano, Tony’s entire being thinks _stop_, and everything freezes.

“What the hell,” Tony breathes, darting between the people and then around Thor, into the Milano and back outside. Everything is still, and Tony wildly wonders if he stopped _time_.

As soon as the idea occurs to him, he becomes aware of the pressure ballooning inside his very existence, like his atoms are being crushed into dust, and then he finds the metaphorical pressure valve and _lets go_.

Then everything is moving again after a bright green flash, Thor disappearing into the Milano, and Tony is so exhausted that all he can do is whisper, “Bye, buddy.”

-

Stopping time takes a whopping amount of energy, and teleporting takes a fair bit out of Tony as well. It’s like any ability he has aside from floating takes some sort of ghost-stamina, so he takes a full day to recuperate before he goes to Manhattan.

“Why are you on the list of people I care about?” Tony bitches once he realizes he can teleport straight into the Sanctum next to Stephen Strange. “I don’t even _like_ you.”

Across from him, Strange reads through some ancient book, flipping the pages with a flick of his fingers without actually touching the paper. What a show-off.

“I think my magical poltergeist existence is linked to the Infinity Stones,” Tony says loudly. “And this seems straight up your magical voodoo bullshit alley.” Even louder: “So if you could just, I don’t know, do a seance or something, we could work on this.”

And weirdly enough, Strange twitches and raises his head.

“Holy shit,” Tony says. Then yells, “Hey, jackass, can you hear me?”

Strange squints, somewhere a little to the left of Tony’s general direction, then snaps the book shut and seats himself on the nearest armchair and makes a quick gesture with his hands, and—there is absolutely no other way to put this—fucking astral projects himself into the air.

“What the everloving fuck?”

The rather ghostly form of Strange looks toward Tony, then floats closer. “I really hope I’m wrong,” he says, “but is that you, Tony?”

“You can hear me!” Tony yells.

Strange cocks his head with a little furrow to his brow, like he’s struggling to hear Tony even when Tony is yelling the best he can. “A little like you’re underwater, but yes, I hear you. And for the record, I can’t actually see you, but there’s—” he waves a hand in Tony’s general direction “—some kind of orange haze where you are, when I’m in the Astral Plane.”

“Oh, you actually call it the Astral Plane.” Tony both hates and loves Strange’s mystical bullshit right now. “But you can sense me even when you’re like, in the reality plane.” 

Strange makes a pained face with a clear effort not to nitpick Tony’s magic terminology. “Only a vague sense that something is there. I think it might have to do with my prolonged proximity and exposure to the Time Stone.”

Right, that reminds Tony why he’s here in the first place. “Yeah, well, I think I used the Time Stone or whatever’s left of it.” He thinks of the flash of blue when he teleports and adds, “And the Space Stone.”

“That’s not alarming at all,” Strange says, and damn, it’s nice to banter with somebody who’s going to remember it afterwards. It’s such a shame it had to be this asshole of all people. “Tell me everything from the beginning.”

-

“I think,” Strange finally says, “that there’s been a lingering aftereffect of the stones after you used them.”

“No shit, Sherlock.” Tony considers a very unappealing possibility. “You think the original Thanos got ghosted, too?”

Strange shakes his head. “I believe the reason you still have the remnants of the stones’ power in you is because you died from using them. Thanos—and probably Dr. Banner—would be different stories.”

“Good to know we don’t have him haunting us after all these years.” Actually, this explains why he hasn’t seen a single ghost aside from himself during his tenure as post-life Tony. He’s not as much as a ghost as he is a manifestation of the lingering effects of the most powerful stones in the whole goddamn universe. “So, Time Stone let’s me freeze time and Space Stone lets me teleport.”

“I believe your ability to communicate with people in their sleep is the work of the Mind Stone.” Strange waves a hand at Tony’s general spatial existence. “And the Soul Stone is probably why you’re manifesting like this in the first place. Maybe the reality stone, too, since I think there’s a bit of red mixed in.”

Reality warping would definitely be needed for Tony to exist as he is at all, he figures. “You think I could do something with the Power Stone?”

Strange shoots him a look. “I’d really rather you didn’t.”

“And just to spite you, I’m going to make it happen,” Tony says brightly. 

A strange look passes over Strange’s face at that, and then it’s gone. “I suppose I deserve that.”

It takes Tony a moment to realize what Strange is referring to. “Oh hey, come on. You realize I don’t actually blame you for any of this, right?”

“It’s not a matter of blame,” Strange begins, but Tony isn’t going to hear any of it.

“Fuck you, this isn’t on you. You knew, yeah, but I’m the one who made the choice. Don’t make my choice about you.” Maybe that sounds harsh, but it’s true, and he knows Strange wouldn’t accept anything less. “Look, I would’ve done the same thing, if things were the other way around.”

Strange huffs an empty chuckle. “You would have done everything in your power to not let it be someone else.”

“Yeah, well.” Tony knows himself, and he knows Strange is more similar to him than anybody else. It’s why he disliked Strange right from the start, after all. “It took fourteen-million futures to realize it couldn’t be you, right?”

He can read the surprise in Strange’s eyes, the set of his jaw, and he thinks that yes, they’re too similar to each other. They might’ve made great rivals. Or friends.

“Like I said,” Tony says, “I would’ve done the same.”

-

It happens by complete accident.

One moment, the government is growling at Rhodey and Wilson about more political bullshit regarding the Avengers. The next, Tony is smacking a metaphysical hand to their projector and then with a purple crackle, the projector shorts out so spectacularly that it basically combusts on the spot.

“Oh my god,” one of the government officials says.

“Oh my god,” Rhodey mutters, hiding a ghost of a smile behind a cough.

“Oh my god,” Tony hollers with a wide grin.

-

“Oh my god,” Strange groans into his hands with an air of defeat when Tony reports back to him bursting with glee.

-

There are two questions that Tony never asks, because he knows they can’t be answered unless the answers present themselves.

The first question is: is Natasha out there? He doesn’t see her, even when he goes to visit Clint and checks in on Bruce. He knows that dying _for_ a single Infinity Stone isn’t exactly the same as dying _from_ all of them, but he still can’t help but feel a flicker of hope in the quietest, loneliest moments.

The second question is more frightening than the first, which is why he can’t voice it, even to Strange: is there a limit to how much energy Tony can consume?

Tony knows that using any of his abilities tires him out. He doesn’t know if there’s some kind of maximum capacity; if one day he’s going to run out of whatever lingering energy the stones have left behind and he’ll wink out of ghostly existence. He doesn’t _know, _and he won’t know until one day he simply runs out of time.

So he doesn’t ask.

-

It doesn’t occur to him to try Nick Fury until it does, and then he actually succeeds teleporting straight to Fury—and discovers himself in outer space, what the _hell_.

“Why are you in outer space and who the hell is taking care of shit on Earth?” Tony yells at him once Fury is asleep. He’s only half-angry, because he spent a whole day exploring an alien fort and reveling in the fact that there wasn’t any significant difference in the amount of energy it took to go between places on earth and between entire planets. “Because I swear I saw you talking to Rhodey literally two days ago!”

“I’ve left Talos in charge to pretend he’s me while I’m taking a vacation,” Fury replies. Then, “What the hell?”

Something Tony’s discovered during his occasional dream trips is that whoever he’s talking to _always_ answers honestly. Which is kind of cheating, so he tries not to abuse that particular Mind Stone trick, but for now, he wants _answers_.

“Okay, for starters,” Tony says, trying not to show how fucking cheerful he is about Fury having no choice but to be truthful for once, “who the fuck is Talos?”

-

Once he’s gotten satisfactory answers, Tony pays a visit to Thor and Nebula, because he now knows that he’s capable of going back home afterwards. 

He watches Nebula play cat’s cradle with Mantis and Rocket badger the tree he treats like his own son. He sees Thor booming with laughter, throwing a friendly arm around Quill’s shoulders as Quill groans but doesn’t shrug him off. They look happy.

Tony goes home, back to Pepper and Morgan, and doesn’t visit Thor again. He doesn’t need to.

-

When he’s not talking to Strange or visiting friends or staying with his family, Tony checks in on Peter. The poor kid is clearly struggling to regain a sense of normalcy, which would be hard enough for a seasoned adult to accomplish, let alone a teenager who has a secret identity and has nobody else to guide him through the aftermath of this particular mess. The remaining members of the Avengers are too preoccupied with putting the team and the world back together to remember a kid hero in Queens. Strange staunchly refuses to mentor Peter because he’s not equipped for it, citing that he’s willing to help in physically threatening circumstances, not emotionally tenuous ones.

(Secretly, Tony thinks Strange is just terrified of the prospect of dealing with a teenager’s actual feelings. Tony was terrified, too. He still is.)

The thing is, all Tony wanted back when he was alive was for Peter to come back. He wanted a world where Peter was alive, and that was all he’d been thinking about when he’d started messing around with the possibility of time travel. And even though Peter is alive now, it’s not enough. He wants Peter to go to school and ace his classes and be a normal kid. He wants Peter to go kick asses of small-time criminals and stay on good terms with law enforcement and be a better hero than Tony ever was. He wants Peter to cry less and smile more and believe in himself.

It’s funny how Peter is the one sore spot that Tony keeps circling back to. He’s not even sure why; he loves Pepper and Morgan more and he spent much more time with the other Avengers and Strange is the one person he can even communicate with on a normal level, but Peter is the one Tony worries over the most. Maybe it’s because he feels like the kid needs somebody to watch over him or some other weird guardian angel shit like that. 

Maybe he just feels like he never watched over the kid enough, back when he still had the chance.

-

Happy, who should be Peter’s go-to adult when it comes to down to superhero business, is most definitely flirting with May. 

“This is _so_ not why I left you in charge of the kid, buddy,” Tony groans, but he isn’t seriously bothered. It’s good to see Happy smiling and getting on with life instead of being steeped in grief or regret. It’s good to see the people Tony cares about acclimatizing to a world without him. Just like how Bruce smiles more nowadays and Steve is learning to fully enjoy his retirement.

He thought it’d hurt more, to see people move on like this, but he’s only proud of them. Maybe the whole afterlife thing mellows a person out. 

“You could come over and help out,” May offers, and Tony leaves out of sheer vicarious embarrassment as Happy literally trips over his feet to say yes. Some things are just too much to watch, living or dead.

-

A third question, which doesn’t haunt Tony so much as puzzle him: why does it matter whether he stays or passes on into the next phase of the afterlife? He’s already dead, and he doesn’t really consider his ghostly existence as some kind of second lease on life. He was ready to die, back when he had the Infinity Stones burning into his flesh and the whole universe at the tips of his fingers. He’d been content, in those last moments, to finally rest—and now here he is, not at all resting in peace. 

Every extra moment he gets to see his family and everybody else is a gift, and it doesn't bother him to lose that. But he still feels the need to _stay_.

Everybody else is moving on; why is Tony reluctant to do the same?

-

It’s entirely selfish, but Tony is ecstatic that Peter is going abroad for a science trip. It’s a while since Tony’s been anywhere outside of North America (or outer space). He doesn’t have a person or a place he’s attached to enough to teleport to overseas, and the prospect of stealing aboard a disappointingly slow passenger plane for a long ride on his own seems both pathetic and boring. So having Peter as an anchor all the way in Europe is an opportunity for Tony to go enjoy the sights a little.

More than that, though, Tony is glad that Peter has this trip to look forward to. His nerves over a girl and excitement over a vacation has been balancing the scales in favor of typical teenager normalcy over poor coping with the superhero side of his life. It’s good to see Peter act like an ordinary kid instead of a boy with the weight of the whole world on his shoulders.

He knows it’s not something meant to last; Peter is never going to be entirely normal, because his heart won’t allow him to be, no matter how much he wishes otherwise. Peter knows it too. But it’s nice to dream, just for a while.

-

He follows Peter to Venice and immediately departs to go have a look around Murano, which is charming and quaint as always. He came here with Pepper, once, and they’d taken a slow walk through the island, looking at glass figures that Tony kept offering to buy and Pepper kept refusing, content with simply looking at the sunlight glinting off of them.

He’s so caught up in reminiscing that he doesn’t notice anything amiss until he hears a rumble in the distance and sees a tower crumble to the ground, and then he thinks _Peter_.

The next moment, he’s in the middle of what looks like almost a war zone, water flooded everywhere as Peter picks himself up from the ruins of brick and concrete. A figure is flying off in the air cloaked in green smoke.

“This was supposed to be a normal school trip,” Peter groans half-heartedly, wiping his hands on his jeans. Tony hates how young he sounds under the weariness. He hates how the world doesn’t even allow for a midsummer night’s dream for this kid. Hates how powerless he is as he watches Peter trudge back to his hotel, drenched and shoulders hunched and looking so terribly lonely. 

-

“So I was thinking you might know something about magical water monsters,” Tony says, but Strange can’t hear him. He’s busy dealing with some Lovecraftian abomination that Tony can’t even begin to comprehend. “Never mind.”

Strange doesn’t notice him.

Tony wonders if he looks just as lonely as Peter did. It doesn’t matter, really.

Nobody can see Tony anyway.

-

Fury—Talos, Tony knows, but he sees Fury’s face and can’t help the way he labels him in his metaphysical brain—takes Peter back to a hideout where Tony sees Maria Hill and agents and, wait a second, is that—

-

Quentin Beck, Tony thinks, is either a fraud or an anomaly, and he honestly doesn’t know which option he believes more. 

Correction: he knows what he believes more, but he desperately wants the truth to be the other way around. He wants Beck to be who he claims he is: a hero from a parallel universe, a wildly different iteration of the man who had worked for Stark Industries once upon a time. It’s a hope that flickers weakly in Tony's ghostly chest, a glimmer of a wish for someone trustworthy on Peter's side. 

"Have you even tried running a background check?" Tony half-heartedly asks fake Fury, even though he knows he won't be heard. He figures a parallel world backstory and a track record of vanquishing supernatural forces of nature merit very little scrutiny in terms of superhero credibility, but he knows the real Fury would have still checked for every possibility, vigilant for even the smallest lie. If the real Fury was here, he would have known better than to drag a kid into this mess and then expect the kid to act like a soldier, sacrificing himself for the greater good without hesitation. Peter might have a heart of gold and strength that could bend steel, but he's already sacrificed so much while he's so young, and it makes Tony wish he were still alive. 

He doesn't even know what he'd do if he were. Save the world in Peter's stead? Protect Peter from this version of Fury's ruthlessness? Tell Peter that it's okay to be selfish?

There's so many things he should have told Peter. It's too late to say any of them now.

-

Prague is a whirlwind of fire and steel and lies. Tony sees through the cloaking tech and the holograms as soon as he enters the eye of the fiery hurricane. He sees the drones buzzing around him and feels the kind of cold despair that drains the warmth from you, regardless of his lack of corporeal form. All he can think of how this is the doing of another man who believes himself wronged by Tony. Yet another burden that Peter has inherited from Tony.

And Peter, sitting later in a bar full of lies and deceit, turns to Beck and offers him the one thing Tony left behind for him. That was meant _for_ him. And it breaks Tony's heart, to see how Peter doesn't realize that he's worthy of everything Tony has gifted him. How Peter has no faith in himself, to the point that he doesn't know that Tony had believed in him.

"Did I never tell you?" Tony calls after Peter's hunched back, his words unheard and meaningless. Like a tree falling in a forest with nobody to listen. Too late, always too late. "Did I never tell you how proud of you I am?"

-

He follows Beck back to his lair and sees the amount of technology and time and work Beck has put into this con of his and Tony feels rage rattle in his ghostly chest, because Beck is _brilliant_. Not half as much as Tony or as much as Peter, but Beck had real potential, had helped develop BARF—and isn't it all so incredibly idiotic, that Beck took the most offense at the naming of a project he didn't even spearhead—and he'd chosen to use his brilliance to pursue fame and glory at the cost of innocent lives. Instead of making the world a better place, Beck decided to take advantage of a boy's trust and twist Tony's legacy into one of destruction.

In the back of Tony's mind, he swears he can hear Obie's laughter.

"Like hell I'm letting another asshole use my tech to hurt people," Tony snarls, watching Beck's crew start uploading their software hack to EDITH. He knows he can put a dent in their plans, but a small dent is all he can leave. The Power Stone left him with only a limited amount of power to fry electronics, and whatever he destroys right now will be replaceable. There's no point in breaking the glasses now; they have EDITH linked up to their systems and until Beck’s administrative control is revoked—which would only be possible if Peter were to take back control, since nobody else was granted access, and _how can Peter not know how much Tony believed in him_—it would be pointless to try destroy any of the tech here when it can be easily replaced within minutes. In fact, he realizes, he can’t do much damage to the drones anyway. They’re reinforced to be shock-proof and nearly unstoppable; Tony’s best approximation of a punch at one of them only elicits a moment of static.

He’s deliberating over how much damage he could possibly deal without depleting himself completely when he hears Beck start to go unhinged, roaring about how he can’t afford a single slip-up when he’s trying to fool the entire world and Nick Fury. 

“Pull up EDITH,” Beck orders, and Tony watches in mounting horror as he realizes who’s on that screen, discovering Beck’s lies and painting a target on his own back. He’s drowning in dread and fear and fury as Beck blames somebody else for his declaration to kill Peter, and Tony wants to kick his teeth in. He wants to _hurt_ Beck, but all he can do is cause the engine of a drone to sputter. It doesn’t even crash to the ground.

He’s just as powerless as he was back in Malibu. His arc reactor ripped from his chest, barely able to move, heart shredding itself to pieces as Obie walked away saying Pepper’s name like a kill order. And this time, Tony doesn’t have a backup reactor and a metal suit to go save someone he loves.

-

When he teleports back to Peter’s side, the kid is well on his way to Berlin. He must’ve realized Beck would have tapped all incoming calls on (not) Fury’s phone. Tony follows him the whole way, keeping a vigilant eye out for Beck or his ilk, but nothing seems to be out of the ordinary.

Then Fury pulls up in a car and Tony doesn't realize that something is wrong until they arrive at a building that is saturated with an electric hum that he can sense down to his atoms. It's a trap, he realizes, right down to this fabricated version of Fury, a mask he can see through once he looks close enough. He wants to shout a warning, make a drone glitch, anything, but by the time he's gathered enough energy to make the image of Maria Hill sputter, the illusion is breaking apart and everything is going to hell, and there's absolutely nothing Tony can do.

-

_How dare you_, Tony thinks, like a snarl clenched behind his teeth, rage radiating through him as he watches Beck conjure a nightmare of Tony's grave and lay the blame all on Peter's shoulders. _How fucking dare you_.

Peter is stumbling through a hall of mirrors, a wreckage constructed by all the twisted lies Beck has woven. The kid could see through those illusions in a heartbeat if he trusted his gut, but Peter doesn’t know how to believe in himself anymore, and Tony has a sinking feeling that he’s the reason for that.

-

Peter gets _hit by a train_ and all Tony wants to do is choke the life out of Beck with his own bare hands. No, that’s not entirely true. All Tony wants to do is strangle Beck and tell Peter that to have some faith in himself. That Tony never doubted him, even when Peter messed up. That he’s proud of Peter and that won’t change, no matter what the rest of the world thinks.

Instead what he says is this: “I don’t regret choosing you.”

“You should,” Peter says, the words wrenched out of him as he stands under a golden limitless sky, his shoulders hunched and eyes damp. “I let you down.”

“Let me down? No. You messed up, yes, but I’m not exactly a paragon of virtue and I sure as hell know what it’s like to mess up even when you’re trying your best.” There’s so much Tony wants to say but he doesn’t have enough time; he doesn’t know how long this train ride will last and he can’t afford to expend more energy than necessary when the fight isn’t over yet. “So listen up. You made a mistake. You trusted the wrong person. You lost a fight. So what? I did that. Lots of people do that.”

“But I can’t afford to make mistakes.”

“Bullshit.” Tony takes a step forward and pokes a firm finger at Peter’s chest. “I never expected you to be perfect, kiddo. I expected you to be _better_. You know what that means?”

Peter looks bewildered, but there’s an edge of dawning comprehension in his eyes. Like the answer is on the tip of his tongue but he forgot how to pronounce it. “That I failed?”

“It means,” Tony says, and he wishes Peter would remember this when he wakes up, even only a fragment of it, “you’re allowed to fail and try again.”

-

After watching Peter wake up in a Dutch holding cell and reunite with Happy, Tony hovers inside the jet as the two of them discuss the impossible standards of being Tony Stark and how Tony was never really reaching them. It’s a little embarrassing to listen to. Not because Tony’s particularly ashamed of the fact that he was a hot mess during his lifetime, but because he can clearly see how much Happy and Peter cared about him despite his flaws. 

It’s the first time, Tony realizes, that Peter is sharing his naked grief with somebody else. Peter’s been shouldering his guilt and pain for so long that it’s been festering inside of him, like water going stale, bottled up and left in the moldy dark. But now he’s finally gritting out the words Tony’s seen him swallow down for so long, and he’s breathing easier without the guilt clogging his lungs. 

When Peter starts configuring his new suit and Happy takes a moment to observe the scene with nostalgia in his eyes, Tony stands beside his old friend and sees a Peter who’s already surpassed all of Tony’s expectations. Somebody better than Iron Man.

_He’s going to be okay_, Tony thinks, and that’s when he decides he’s ready to find out the answer to the second question.

-

As Peter and Happy fly across the English Channel to stop Beck for once and for all, Tony flies his way across the European continent back to Prague. There’s no emotional anchor in Beck’s lair for Tony to teleport back to, so he has to cross the entirety of Germany as fast as he can to reach their systems before Beck does anything drastic. He forces time to a standstill as he goes as fast as he can, but the green glow drains away from him within minutes, and he feels his entire existence cracking apart under the pressure. When he finally lets time move forward again, he feels misaligned and broken, but he doesn’t let that deter him. He goes and goes and goes until he’s found the space that is Beck’s version of a command center, where he can hear Beck growling at one of his lackeys to produce an answer to Fury’s question, and Tony can tell just from the resulting act of ridiculous dialogue that Beck’s cover is going to be blown. You don’t have to be the real Nick Fury to see that bullshit for what it is.

“Do you see anything?” The guy manning the computer asks Beck, and Tony feels a flash of vindictive pride when he realizes Peter must be destroying the drones and breaking the illusion apart, pulling the curtain down wholesale for the whole world to see what exactly is going on backstage.

It takes a while for Tony to work up the energy he needs to strike. He’s already pinpointed where to focus and what he needs to wreck, but it’s only a matter of minutes before he’s finally mustered the power to break the hardware that links Beck’s computer systems to EDITH. It won’t stop Beck, not while he still has the glasses, but it’ll be enough of a dent to allow Peter to fight on his own terms.

He’s ready to deal the blow when Beck’s tech guy reprograms the illusion, pulling the curtain back up. “I don’t know how you’re going to spin this,” the guy says.

Tony can hear Beck’s feral grin from over the comms. “Everybody knows it’s an illusion now. They don’t know who’s pulling the strings just yet.”

And just like that, Tony knows what he’s planning.

“Oh, hell no.” As Beck starts recording a lie that crucifies Peter in the worst of ways, Tony finds the hungry, angry part of him that crackles purple and holds onto it, even when he feels his entire being shredding apart from the inside. Putting every ounce of his strength into the movement, he slams through the CPU, causing the whole computer to spark and go up in smoke, the image of Beck on one of the monitors freezing up before blacking out entirely. The tech guy is shouting, confused and alarmed, calling Beck’s name and backing away from the computer like it might explode. Tony manages to channel a last tendril of energy into the external hard drive, making sure there’s nothing for Beck’s crew to salvage. 

He’s so exhausted, falling apart from the inside out, his atoms disconnecting from each other, but he pulls himself together as best as he can, listening to the fizz of a well-destructed hard drive. He thinks of Peter, who is brave and stubborn and trying to do the right thing even when it’s destroying him. Alone and facing down a sociopath with an army made from the twisted shreds of Tony’s legacy. He thinks _I need to be sure_, and then he’s in London in a bridge of metal and glass as Peter says, “Your lies are over, Beck.”

“This certainly isn’t ideal,” Beck replies, “but I have contingencies.”

He’s talking about framing Peter. The recording file Beck was sending to his crew would have been corrupted beyond repair, and Beck knows it. He must be banking on winning this fight and gaining the opportunity to pin everything on Spider-man. 

Strangely, Tony isn’t worried. He doesn’t think Peter will lose.

Even as Peter closes his eyes and fights his way through the drones, leaping and punching as his sixth sense dictates, Tony drifts and watches without doing anything else. This is Peter’s fight. Tony can’t fight other people’s fights now, and he’s okay with that. He’d already accepted that it’s not his job to save the world anymore. 

The third question echoes in his mind. Why is he still here?

And then Peter gets hit by a stray round, because he’s only a kid who can move fast and hit hard but he can’t move faster bullets. He dodges the rest but it must hurt, because it slows him down a little. It still doesn’t change the fact that Beck won’t win this, Tony is sure, but then Beck opens his fucking mouth.

“Tony left you one goddamn thing, Peter. One!” He taps the glasses and grins manically, a madman unraveling at the seams as his defeat closes in on him. “And that one thing is going to kill you today, because he failed you just as much as you’re failing him.”

Tony isn’t worried about Peter, but for fuck’s sake, he’s _furious_. He’s done with Beck’s condescension and manipulation and lies. This is a fight Peter is meant to win, but Tony wants to make Beck _pay_ for all the people he’s hurt, all the things he’s done to Peter, all the ways he’s dirtied Tony’s legacy. He wants Beck to suffer for all of it. He’s so angry that his whole vision is going red.

And then everything is _red. _

Reality ripples around Tony, his existence shifting into physical form, atoms realigning and connecting, until he’s breathing air again and feeling the sunlight and _alive_ right then and there.

“What the hell?” Beck whispers.

Tony can already feel the strain of existing in a physical way again, his energy rapidly draining away, but he can’t help but grin. “Hey, you son of a bitch.”

He’s wearing his ordinary clothes, the ones he used to wear in his lab, but when he lifts his arm a gauntlet materializes around it, almost as fluidly as the nano-machines Tony used for his armor, and as soon as he thinks that, the armor snaps into existence around him, covering Tony whole except for the open faceplate. And when he raises his palm to face Beck, a pulse fires out to hit Beck squarely in the stomach. 

“Fuck,” Beck gasps, stumbling backwards. The hit must have been significantly weaker than Tony’s usual firepower, but given that he can feel his very existence trickling away right now, it’s unsurprising. Instead, he follows Beck and easily knocks aside a drone that tries to shoot him. He hears Peter behind him, too preoccupied with his own remaining drones to realize what’s happening, and feels a fierce pride at how the kid doesn't stay down even after taking a hit. Another flash of anger lances through him at the thought of what Beck tried to do to this amazing kid, and he punches Beck hard right where he shot him. 

Beck makes a gutted, gasping sound and slumps to his knees, hunched over and pathetic enough to let the worst of the anger seep away. Tony’s contemplating kicking him another time when he hears another drone crash behind him and decides this is Peter’s decision to make, not his. So he steps aside, feeling the edges of his self go blurry while Peter walks up to Beck, who’s making another last-ditch attempt to trick Peter. 

It doesn’t work, of course. Tony knew it wouldn’t. 

After the cloaking fades away and Peter snatches the glasses from Beck, Tony hears an electric hum coming from the drone nearest to Beck. He doesn’t understand what it means at first, and then he realizes that it’s the drone’s camera, recording Peter as he undoes the disaster Beck unleashed on London, and Tony feels a frisson of disgust as he approaches Beck’s dying body and steps on the camera lens, crushing it underfoot.

“Like hell you will,” Tony mutters, and steps away. He can feel himself fading away fast, and he’s running out of his own very existence. This might be the answer to question number two, because Tony is pretty sure there’s nothing left of him or the stones now. He’s just glad that he was able to make sure Beck didn’t do anything Peter couldn’t recover from.

“Mr. Stark?”

He turns and Peter’s right there, looking wide-eyed and gobsmacked, his eyes flickering the disincorporating edges of Tony’s limbs and then to Tony’s face. 

“Jeez, I must’ve hit my head really hard,” Peter says, but he doesn’t sound like he really believes it. He sounds like he doesn’t know what to believe at all, and Tony doesn’t want Peter to believe that Tony’s actually haunting him or unable to move on. But he knows what he wants Peter to believe.

He steps forward and the armor melts right off of him, and he’s not the great Tony Stark or Iron Man anymore. He’s just Tony, who loves his wife and daughter. Who worried over whether his friends would move on okay after he died. Just Tony, who wanted to be sure this kid that he loves like his own would be okay without him. “Peter.”

“Is this real?” Peter asks, and Tony doesn’t need to answer that.

Instead, he throws his arms around Peter and hugs him tight. Says, “I’m so proud of you.”

There’s more he wants to say, but his voice is gone the next moment, then his hands. He wants to say more, because now Peter will remember every word and know it to be true, but he feels Peter hug him back and thinks that Peter has everything he needs.

He feels himself fade away, the world falling away from him, and he thinks it was worth spending everything he had for this moment. It’s okay now, he thinks. Peter’s okay. Tony doesn’t need to be here anymore.

-

When Tony wakes up, Peter is already back in New York and Natasha is waiting for him with a smug smile on her beautiful face. It’s weird. She doesn’t really have a visible face, but Tony can tell it’s there. 

“I’m not…gone,” Tony remarks.

“Not yet.” Natasha sits beside him and kicks her feet, all without somehow having any physical form. “But you can choose to go any time. Whenever you’re ready.”

“Huh.” He looks out at the Manhattan skyline. “I didn’t see you around before.”

“I was checking in on people. Same as you.” She shrugs. “Mostly making sure Clint didn’t accidentally trip into the garbage dump and seeing if Sam was having fun ruling over the Avengers with a feathered fist.”

Tony snorts. He missed Natasha’s dry humor. “Guess we just missed each other. So are you still here because you wanna save the world, clear the red from your ledger?”

“No. And neither are you.” The sky is cloudless and achingly blue, like the world never knew what it was like to be torn apart in half, and Tony knows Natasha is right. He’s not here because he’s worried about the world. 

“I was here because I wanted to be sure everybody was okay without me.” It’s the answer to the third question. The reason Tony felt obligated to stay. Why he couldn’t move on. “Not like, in a vain kind of ‘the world needs me’ kind of way but, you know. I wanted to be sure everybody could move on without me.”

He can sense that Natasha is smiling. It’s the smile she uses when she’s secretly proud of him. “Are you satisfied with how everything turned out?”

He thinks about Pepper, who promised to be okay and kept her word like the miracle she is. He thinks of Morgan, who is learning to keep Tony as a precious memory. He thinks of Steve and Bruce and Thor, all finding their ways of life in different directions and happy the way they are. He thinks of Rhodey and Happy and Stephen Strange. All the people in Tony’s life who survived and grieved and moved forward, not lingering over Tony but committing him to their memories anyway.

He thinks of Peter, who’s finally okay. 

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Everybody’s going to be fine.”

He can’t save them from the end of the world, but they’re strong enough without him. They’ll be okay.

“I’ve been waiting for you for a while now,” Natasha says. She reaches out to him. “Ready to go?”

Tony looks at the city below them. He has an inkling that Strange will know when he’s gone, and he’s been blessed with extra time with his family already. He knows everybody is finding their happiness without him. He doesn’t need to go see them one more time. 

He reaches out to take Natasha’s hand, and finds himself more at peace than he ever could have expected. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

**Author's Note:**

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